doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com E.M. Reilly; History; Chronology; Serial Numbers

And there is still no evidence that Reilly had a fairly large gun manufacturing facility that had upwards of 300 people employed in the production of all manner of firearms.

I keep checking in to see if something has been found, since we were promised substantive evidence. But what we get is still more usage of the word gunmaker as found in a number of old advertisments. The longer this goes on, the more accurate this following assessment appears to be:


We had a guy right here on this forum who bragged for years about his "award winning wines". As it turned out, he wasn't a wine maker at all. He had a little vineyard of a couple acres, and was the smallest supplier of grapes that were purchased by an actual wine making company that did all of the processing, fermenting, bottling, and sales. Then, as now, there are people who are prone to exaggerating their position and place in life. And nowhere has this behavior been seen more frequently than in advertising claims. The false and absurdly questionable claims made by many in the firearms business are no exception.


Well... I suppose so... if one is impressed by sheer volume, with little regard for accuracy and analysis. For instance, look at this statement. Not many guys even live to be 90, let alone are working gunmakers for 90 years:


But that's nothing compared to Methusela of the Bible, so it must be true. Something else that literally jumped out at me is the information about Reilly's business at 502 New Oxford Street. The "research" describes it as a "huge" building of 10,000 square feet. That sounds pretty big, unless you are even a little bit familiar with manufacturing operations that employ around 300 employees. In reality, that would be extremely small, especially for a building that also contained offices and retail sales space. Do the math, and divide 10,000 sq. ft. by 300 employees. You get a work area of 33.33 sq. ft. per employee. That's little more than 5 by 6 feet per man. And that small closet sized area per man would have to include hand tools, barrel boring machinery, other machinery, work benches, vises, jigs and fixtures, parts inventory, stock blanks, bluing, case hardening, and wood finishing facilities, partially finished guns of all descriptions, along with completed guns and merchandise for sale... and our poor guy with less room to turn around than a canned sardine.

Our undaunted researcher qualifies this with unfounded claims that complete guns were being built in London in that era in shops the size of a kitchen. But just how many kitchens are only 33 sq. ft., other than in a small camping trailer???

Then take a close look at the pictures that are alleged to be of this building at 502 New Oxford St. It is clearly evident that they aren't even the same building. The entire facade is different. The architecture is totally different. And neither appears like they would accommodate anywhere near 300 employees.




But hope springs eternal with 90 percent left to come... unless Dave's server crashes from another 730 pages of copy and paste photos, advertisements with highlighted words, and lots of conjecture.